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Black Iceberg

Does anyone have any further information about the iceberg being black. Fleet testified it was a black berg and Lee said it was a grey or dark grey berg. Also a quartermaster on the foredeck testified that the berg appeared blue. Any other onformation eg other witnesses would be much appreciated.

There's nothing about a "black berg" which is remarkable as it sounds. All it refers to is an iceberg which has rolled over because melt off changed it's distribution of weight, and which has not been exposed to the air long enough to build up a frost.

On a moonless light in a calm sea, this would be extremely difficult to spot with the naked eye.

You only "see" something because light reflects from it. The less light the less likely hood of seeing something. Smooth sea reflects starlight, irregularly shaped almost vertical surfaces have less chance of doing so. It follows that a poor reflective surface will appear black against a surface which is reflecting the glow of starlight. Icebergs are very hard to detect with radar.

Hi shelley, thanks for these links and i will check them out. I have read three testimonies and they describe the berg as black, blue and grey so Titanic definitely hit a berg that had its dark side showing to the two lookout men fleet and lee.

How do you explain that container vessels sailing full blast in all kinds of weather via the Strait of Belle Isle, locate hundreds of icebergs on every single passage during the season and never reported a single collision against an iceberg? We even hear rarely that a box ship collided with a growler, but that is a total different matter. Icebergs are unproblematic to detect by Radar. A 10cm for longer range and a 3cm for closer range. The old cathode ray tube were the best for icebergs detection and ice navigation. Digital ones depend on the resolution quality (pixel density) thus the cost price.

Have a good watch Jim ! (the captain left a note that he does not want to be called for nothing )

When was the radar invented?
The first practical radar system was produced in 1935 by the British physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt, and by 1939 England had established a chain of radar stations along its south and east coasts to detect aggressors in the air or on the sea.

I just watched a video on the Titanic Channel that talked about this. Parks Stephenson the presenter said that most of the reports by passengers and crew said that it was a white iceberg. He postulated that Lightoller and the lookouts didn't really have an answer on to why it wasn't spotted sooner and were offering that explanation to try and make sense out of the reason.

This is interesting ie the climate science article of the night of the sinking of the titanic .

Best regards.

Shelley

Click to expand...

Interesting article...thanks! Lots of evidence that the atmosphere was playing tricks on what people were seeing that night. I've just been reading up on it in another thread. I posted this link earlier in that thread. I don't think the people who report it as a dark iceberg were lying just that thats how it appeared to them at the distance and angle they were viewing it from. The people who reported seeing it closer up reported it as white. Just speculation on my part.

Everybody wants to come up with some sort of wonky idea to explain something that is quite obvious. The lookouts spotted the iceberg in plenty of time to avoid collision. They didn't "see" it the way kids who've never been outdoors except to run from the car to the computer game do. They were seamen who understood that dangers can be detected by what's not there...that is a black area on an otherwise light horizon. That's what they reported...a "black mass." Anything that casts silhouette 450 miles offshore has to be hard enough to block light and that generally means hard enough to be something which requires reporting to the bridge. Reality is so d#$mned simple that nobody will spend money making a documentary. So, to get the funding you go out to the desert to prove something that never happened might have happened if the conditions were exactly perfect and the North Atlantic was filled with 12,500 feet of sand.

Let's get serious. Fleet and Lee did a fine job that night. According to seaman Scarrott they rang their warning 5 to 8 minutes prior to impact. That's somewhere around 2.2 miles ahead of the ship and well within safe turning range. Fleet never denied that. He couldn't. So he was forced into the craziest testimony on record -- that he couldn't tell any difference between the passage of a minute or so and an hour. He also said that the iceberg was a black mass until it came within visual range when it appeared quite normal (see his drawing), which is what happens.

Sorry guys, but your treeing up the wrong barque (to quote an old joke). Instead of looking at conjectures and oddball theories try looking up Occam's razor. You might cut closer to the truth with that.